Human behavior isn’t the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s only source of inspiration. In 1990, when she was in Boston for a show of her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Ms. Calle visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “It was then that I fell in love with ‘The Concert,’ “ she said of Vermeer’s celebrated canvas from 1658-60 that depicts two women and a man engaged in an at-home musicale. “Every time I had a meeting I would make it in front of that painting so I could see it again,” she recalled.

Later that year came the museum’s famous theft — when two men dressed as Boston police officers entered the Gardner, tied up the guards and made off with 13 works, including the Vermeer. Ms. Calle has recorded that profound loss in two sets of work, one in 1991, called “Last Seen,” and again last year, in “What Do You See?” Both will be shown in the Gardner’s new wing from Oct. 24 through March 3. Ms. Calle said she got the idea to create “Last Seen” after Sheena Wagstaff, then the director of collections and exhibitions at the Frick Collection, interviewed her for a magazine article in front of “The Concert.” In the piece, published after the theft, Ms. Wagstaff joked that perhaps Ms. Calle had something to do with the Vermeer’s robbery because she loved the painting so much.

“The theft was a violence to the collection,” Pieranna Cavalchini, the Gardner’s curator of contemporary art, said. “But now, finally, we can experience it through the eyes of an artist.”

Before the museum built its year-old wing, it didn’t have room to display Ms. Calle’s series in its small special exhibition gallery. Nor could Ms. Calle’s work be shown in the museum itself because Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum’s founder, stipulated in her will that the installation of the collection could not be changed. Though “Last Seen” and “What Do You See?” have never been on view at the Gardner, they have been shown in their entirety or in part at many other institutions, including the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

In “Last Seen,” Ms. Calle stood where the stolen works once hung and asked curators, guards, conservators and other museum staff members what they remembered about the missing paintings. Through texts of these conversations and photographs, she created a visual memory about their absence. “These people spoke about the weight of what these paintings represent,” Ms. Calle said.

More recently, when she learned that four of the original frames had been repaired and were hung back on the walls, empty, she made another visit to Boston, where she created the second series, “What Do You See?,” in which she once again interviewed museum employees as well as visitors. This time she did not mention the missing paintings, instead questioning her subjects about what they saw when looking at the empty frames.

Photo

Through a bequest from Agnes S. Wolf, the National Gallery of Art has acquired Edward Weston’s “Shell 1 (Nautilus)” (1927).Credit
1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents, National Gallery of Art, Washington

“I asked them to talk about what was missing,” Ms. Calle said, “like a ghost I was following.”

A NATIONAL ‘NAUTILUS’

At an institution like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, acquisitions — purchases, gifts and donations — are generally aimed at filling gaps in the collections. This week the gallery announced a variety of newly acquired works — among them, an Orientalist painting, a 20th-century photograph and two sculptures by the earth artist Robert Smithson — that ramp up different areas of its collections.

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“Our holdings in Orientalist paintings are neither wide nor deep,” said Franklin Kelly, the deputy director at the gallery, discussing one of the museum’s latest additions, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “View of Medinet El-Fayoum,” a painting that depicts the oldest city in Egypt, some 80 miles southwest of Cairo. “We had only drawings and two prints by him, but no paintings.”

Nor did the gallery have any sculptures by Smithson, who died in 1973. Virginia Dwan, Smithson’s dealer, recently gave it two: “A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey,” from 1968 (nonsite was Smithson’s term for an indoor work containing substances from an outdoor site elsewhere) and “Glass Stratum,” from 1967, made up of 37 sheets of half-inch-thick glass layered atop one another.

The gallery has impressive holdings in photography but, as Mr. Kelly said, “We don’t have everything, by any means.” One image that had been missing was an example of Edward Weston’s celebrated photos of a single nautilus. Now, through a bequest from Agnes S. Wolf, a political activist who died last year, it has received “Shell 1 (Nautilus),” from 1927. “Agnes Wolf inherited it from her mother, Agnes Strauss-Weil,” Mr. Kelly said. “In the late ‘20s she met Weston and asked him to take her portrait. We think that was when she got this.”

A HALL FOUNDATION SHOW

It has been five years since Norman Rosenthal left the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he spent 31 years as its exhibition secretary, but he continues to organize shows and play dealmaker for institutions in the United States and abroad. Recently he spearheaded a partnership between the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford, England, and the Hall Art Foundation in Reading, Vt. The foundation was established by Andrew J. Hall, a British-born commodities trader who lives in Connecticut, and his wife, Christine, to present a series of exhibitions of postwar and contemporary art drawn from the Halls’ vast collection.

The first show, organized by Mr. Rosenthal, will be paintings and drawings by Malcolm Morley, on view at the Ashmolean from Oct. 8 through March 30. Mr. Morley “was the first winner of the Turner Prize, but recently he has gone off the radar,” Mr. Rosenthal said of the artist perhaps best known for his photo-realist paintings. The Halls’ holdings are made up of about 5,000 works by several hundred artists, including Joseph Beuys, Richard Artschwager, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. This month the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., said that the Halls had agreed to lend it paintings and sculptures by Mr. Kiefer.

Despite their Mass MoCA affiliation, the Halls’ ties to Britain remain strong. “He rowed for Oxford,” Mr. Rosenthal said of Mr. Hall. “Hopefully this will turn into a long-term relationship.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2013, on Page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: Loss That Lingers, In Memory and Place. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe